Privacy Policy
The short version. Rompus has no accounts, no analytics and no server of its own. Everything you and your children put into it stays on your iPhone. The app makes exactly three kinds of network request, listed below, and none of them carries a name, an age, a note or a photo.
1. Who we are
Rompus is made by Justin Calvert, an individual developer in Colorado, USA. "We" in this policy means him. You can reach him at hello@rompus.app.
2. What stays on the phone
Rompus stores the following on your device only, in the app's own storage, protected by your passcode and iOS encryption:
- Each child's name, age band and animal avatar.
- Quests logged, badges earned, notes you type and photos you attach.
- Your home location as a town name and a coordinate, if you chose to set one.
- Your settings, including whether sounds and nudges are on.
- A cached copy of the last forecast and the last sky data, so the app works offline.
We never see any of this. There is no sign-in, so there is nothing to tie it to you. Deleting the app deletes it. If you use iCloud device backup, iOS may include the app's data in your encrypted backup, under your Apple account and Apple's terms, not ours.
3. The three network requests
Weather
When you set a location or refresh, the app sends that coordinate to Apple's WeatherKit service to fetch a forecast. Apple receives the coordinate and your device's standard request information under Apple's privacy policy. Rompus reduces the forecast to rain, snow, cloud and temperature, and caches it on the phone.
Space station orbit data
About once a week the app downloads the International Space Station's public orbital elements from CelesTrak so it can compute passes on the device. That request carries no information about you beyond your device's IP address, which CelesTrak's servers see as any website would. Sun, moon and planet positions are computed entirely on the phone.
Purchases
The Family plan is sold through Apple's App Store. Apple handles payment, receipts and Family Sharing. Rompus checks your subscription status with Apple's StoreKit on the device. We never receive your name, payment details or Apple ID. Apple's handling of purchase data is described in Apple's privacy policy.
4. Location
Rompus asks for your location only when you tap to set it, in onboarding or in Settings. iOS asks your permission first. The app reads it once, stores a town name and a rounded coordinate on the phone, and stops. It does not track your location in the background and never records where you go. You can set a location by typing a town instead, or not at all; the app then shows quests that don't depend on weather.
5. Photos and the camera
Photos you take or choose for a quest are stored in the app on your phone. If you ask, the app also saves a copy to your Photos library. When a quest asks "what did you find?", the app runs Apple's on-device image classifier to suggest a coarse kind of thing, such as "an insect" or "a plant". That runs on the phone. No image is uploaded anywhere, and the app never claims to identify a species.
6. Notifications
Nudges, such as "clear skies tonight", are local notifications scheduled on your phone from the cached forecast and sky data. There is no push server. You can turn them off in Settings or in iOS Settings.
7. Children
Rompus is designed for a parent or guardian to hold and operate. It is not directed at children, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone, children included. The names and ages you enter for your children are stored on your phone only and are never transmitted to us or to anyone else. Kid mode shows a child their own badges on your phone; it collects nothing.
8. Analytics, advertising and tracking
None. Rompus contains no analytics, advertising or tracking code, and no third-party SDKs other than Apple's frameworks and an open-source orbital mechanics library that makes no network requests of its own. Under Apple's App Tracking Transparency rules, Rompus does not track.
9. Your rights
Because we hold no data about you, there is nothing for us to access, correct, export or delete on your behalf. Everything is on your phone: you can edit or delete children, quests, notes and photos inside the app, and deleting the app removes all of it. If you are in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom, California or anywhere else with a privacy law, those rights are satisfied by that design. If you believe we do hold something about you, write to us and we will look.
10. Security
Your data is protected by the same measures that protect everything else on your iPhone: the device passcode, Face ID or Touch ID, and iOS data protection. We recommend keeping a passcode on any phone that holds your children's photos.
11. Changes
If this policy changes, the new version will be posted here with a new effective date, and material changes will be noted in the app's "What's new" sheet. We will never change the app to start collecting data without telling you first.
12. Contact
Justin Calvert, hello@rompus.app.